Should you know your company better than you know your competitors?

When we think of competitive intelligence, we may tend to assume that it’s all about knowing your competitors. While it’s obvious why you need to know as much as you can about the competition, we may assume that we already know everything we need to know about our company.

That may not always be the case though. Here are a few examples why knowing your company better may be more important than knowing your competitors:

– If one of your competitors is very expensive and you think that you can offer a better price, you need to make sure that this strategy is sustainable in the future. Is your company capable to support this strategy on the long term?

– If you learn that a competitor has a weak sales team and you have some “rock stars” who can sell anything, you need to make sure than you can deliver what you sell otherwise the initial success may turn against you

– When your strengths are mainly based on technology that is very likely to become obsolete on the long term, you need to know how your company can adapt to change

In order to know your company better, you need to focus on the human factor more than on the technical or economical ones. Your different types of capital are an important competitive advantage but it’s the human capital that’s the most unpredictable and has the most impact on the future of the company.

Probably the most important challenge when analysing a the employees of a company is that fact that we tend to separate them into categories or see them as a collection of individual employees. The holistic approach is preferable since it’s based on the idea that natural systems (including social and economic) should be seen as wholes, not collections of parts. Companies are legal or economic entities but are rarely seen as an entity characterised by interdependence (relationships between people who depend on each other)

This is why the skills and experience of a decision maker, leader or superstar employee needs to be analysed in the context of the interdependence with the others employees of the company. Similarly, the untapped potential of the employees can be assessed by taking into account the importance it may have in the interconnected company.

These exercises are not usually seen as an important part of a competitive intelligence initiative and we tend to take employees for granted or evaluate them individually. While this approach may reveal conflicting interests in the company as well as a different (even opposite) understanding of its direction and values, these challenges need to be acknowledged in order to be addressed.

The employees or a company can be found in all four quadrants of a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Do you know how many of them are in the weaknesses and threats quadrants? Do you have a plan to move them to the other quadrants?